Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [87]
It goes with the territory, he would say. This applied, I learned, to the small scrutinies he faced daily—to the press, stories true and untrue, to people’s behavior at times glassy-eyed or grasping. To good tables in restaurants, exciting parties, great vacations, velvet ropes parting, and the occasional bump to first class. It also applied, I would learn, to the attentions of other women.
Once we were alone in a room and a girl came in. It was one of the last performances of Winners, and we were on the top floor of the Irish Arts Center in the room where we’d meet to run lines before the stage manager called places. That night, we stood close to the brick wall talking, the old floorboards washed in the honeyed push of light before sunset. The girl came in, beautiful in chinos and sneakers. Later, when we asked, no one seemed to know her or how she’d gotten past the lobby. The audience was invitation-only, and it seemed she had talked her way in and snuck up the stairs. With pale, thin hair, she looked like a young Jessica Lange, but there was something in her eyes, tilted and feral, that made her strange. She’d seen his picture in the paper, she said, the skin at her collarbone flushed magenta. And she just had to meet him.
He tried to be polite. When that didn’t work, he kept moving his back to her. But she stood—waiting, circling, rapt—with no acknowledgment that I was there, in the room, not two feet from her. I watched, fascinated. “Excuse me,” he said, with his eyes locked on me as if that would make her go. She touched his hip, and he startled. Her voice was soft. “You have a hole in your pocket. I can sew that for you.” Gently at first, she began to pull at the lining until it became a mission. That’s when he turned. He was angry. He told her to leave—this was a private conversation, he said, and she was being rude.
Before she reached the door, she looked back, and I saw that there was something satisfied about her. And the heat that had begun on her chest had risen like wildfire to her face.
“Can you believe that?” he said after the door closed.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“Never seen her before in my life.”
So I knew from the start that this happened, that this also went with the territory. But it hardly mattered then. It was the beginning—the time when you’re sure, when you know by the way he looks at you across the room, by the way he stands or says your name, that he is yours.
More than a year later, I asked him to make me a promise. We’d been away for the weekend at a resort, and a girl had followed him around—thrown herself at him, we called it then. She wasn’t a movie star or a model. She was tall and plain, someone I’d known vaguely in grade school. He showed no interest, and I don’t know why it bothered me so much, but it did. There were other things: numbers pressed into his hand whether my head was turned or not, items in gossip columns. Some we’d laugh over; others I wondered about.
After that trip, I knew I didn’t like what it did to me. I didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder, to be always guessing what was true and what wasn’t. I wanted to trust unless there was some reason not to. One afternoon in his kitchen, I asked him to tell me if he was ever unfaithful, if there was ever anyone else. He agreed. He understood, he said, but he wanted me to promise something as well: that if there was ever anyone for me, someone who meant nothing—a tryst—I not tell him. Other girlfriends had, and he didn’t like it.
“You want me not to tell you?” I almost laughed, amazed at the difference between us.